Rising East Online

Editor’s letter

Talk, Talk
Type, Type

There’s a whole lotta talking going on.

Who will build the Thames Gateway? When was the New East End? What is the role of faith in a modern, multicultural society? Where does London 2012 lead to? Why terrorism? These are some of the questions talked about in this issue of Rising East. Talkers include the Rt Hon Charles Clarke MP, the Home Secretary; Geoff Dench, co-author of The New East End; writer and broadcaster Kenan Malik; and Julian Barwick, joint managing director of Development Securities.

We are all part of the chattering classes now. In the cacophony of mobile telephony, who needs another voice, no matter how well intentioned, that will just add to the volume? But perhaps Rising East is not just another voice. Instead, I hope it offers the kind of public deliberation that is not often found in politics nowadays; in other words, that it articulates different points of view, one against another, in such a way as to bring the reader to the place – public space – which belongs neither to individual readers nor particular writers, but is (a) common to all and (b) open to the possibility of advancing this public debate by means of people participating in it.

If so, then Rising East will be different from the chat which surrounds us. Whether written or spoken, the lines of today’s chat are person to person, where each utterance remains the property of the individual interlocutor. Magazines try to speak to readers individually; lecturers are encouraged to address students as individuals, even when speaking to 100+; readers and students are invited to realise their already existing personal properties, i.e. individuality, by responding to what’s been said to them as individuals. Of course such ‘dialogues’ are unsatisfactory, since they are necessarily weighted in favour of editors and academics. But my invitation to writers and readers of Rising East is to leave something of your individuality behind, that you may enter not the heavenly kingdom of individual identity (always a contradiction in terms) but the place where public scrutiny, according to universal, reasonable standards (as property-less as we can collectively make them), is sovereign.

In our present-days towers of Babel, much of the talk is therapeutic. Claire Rayner might have said ‘get it off your chest’; Bob Hoskins observed ‘it’s good to talk’; Madonna’s exhortation is to ‘express yourself’. Different formulations, but the drive to therapy is the same. There is also the sense in which mobile telephony serves as displacement therapy. Here displacement is itself therapeutic: by being continually on the phone to someone somewhere else, we are semi-permanently not quite where we are. Displaced, in other words, and therefore less hemmed in by the setting in which we might otherwise be fixed. This is the consolation of being continually, partially elsewhere.

Rising East, on the other hand, asks you to be here now. It demands your full attention. Some of the opinions expressed in it, a few of the arguments made (none of them, I repeat, represent the position of the University of East London) will be so far from therapeutic as to give you a headache. To which the remedy is that you write a response and enter into the debate, not only for the sake of personal pain relief but in order to advance the sum total of human understanding on the topic in hand. This is what we are here for.

Something which has been giving me a headache is the virtual monopoly of type, type and more type in this publication. In the previous issue my pain relief came in the shape of two, hard-working, student photographers. For this issue, we have the enormous benefit of images from Anthony Lam’s exhibition, Ports of Call. Aside from these bonuses, however, Rising East needs to widen its range of visual resources, and extend the scope of non-type materials to include video and audio files (a facility made available by digital technology and innovative spirits such as IT Services director Tony Wright and UEL webmaster Jonathan Stephenson).

As ever, ideas and contributions are most welcome. Please send to the email address below.

Best

Andrew Calcutt (a.calcutt@uel.ac.uk)

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